French police clash with migrants
Cordons drawn around refugees as authorities clear tents, verify documents
Paris police rounded up Afghan migrants Monday and cleared away some of their tents in a makeshift camp that has resurged in recent weeks in a new challenge to French government efforts to tackle the migrant crisis.
Monday’s operation in northeastern Paris, near the Stalingrad subway station, was marked by tension and confusion.
Riot police physically forced the migrants back and drew a cordon around them, as some migrants yelled and pushed back on riot shields.
Police and regional officials said the operation was aimed at verifying migrants’ documents and sanitary conditions. They insisted it wasn’t a fullscale evacuation, though city officials cleared away some tents along a canal.
President François Hollande said Saturday that the Paris camp will be evacuated soon. Such camps frequently surface in Paris, and authorities routinely clear them out and move some migrants to temporary shelter. Aid groups say some of the Paris migrants recently fled a camp being dismantled in Calais, though Hollande said most are from recent waves of migration to Europe via Libya.
Shikhali Mirzai, a young man who says he arrived in Paris from Afghanistan five days ago, said he did not understand why the police were trashing their tents.
“Where are these people going to sleep?” Mirzai asked.
"It’s very cold. It’s very cold. This isn’t a life, it’s an animal’s life.”
After travelling through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, Mirzai crossed into Europe where he walked hours on end and hid under trucks to make his way to Italy’s border with France. Mirzai said smugglers then disappeared with his money, leaving him hungry in the mountains overlooking the French Riviera, before he made his way to Paris.
“Every day, I see on TV, on the Internet, on Facebook that here there are human rights. Where are the human rights?
"I’m not seeing any human rights here,” said Mirzai.
Charity worker Houssam El Assimi, of local aid group La Chappelle Debout, held a sign reading “No to police raids against migrants.”
He said Monday’s operation was the 27th in the area in which police sort people based on whether they have papers and the right to seek asylum.
Regional authorities say they have cleared out more than 19,000 migrants from Paris since June 2015.
Meanwhile in Calais, authorities are finishing up the dismantling of a camp dubbed the “jungle” that had come to epitomize Europe’s migrant crisis.